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Due to Congressional rules, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology had to choose new leadership this year. At the time, we opined that almost any choice would be a bad one. The Democrats had been neglecting the committee, leaving three seats unfilled, while the Republicans filled their seats with people who were openly hostile to a number of fields of science such as evolution and climate research. Late last year, the House leadership made its intentions clear, attempting to crowdsource a search for federal research grants that people considered wasteful spending.

Now, Congress is following through on that effort. Earlier this month, the House committee held hearings that featured the National Science Foundation (NSF) director and the chair of the board that oversees the science agency. Again, grants made to social scientists were held up as examples of wasteful spending. The committee's new chair, Lamar Smith (R-TX), used these to suggest that "[w]e might be able to improve the process by which NSF makes its funding decisions."

Rather than targeting only grants in the social sciences, Smith is reportedly preparing a bill that would revise the criteria for all grants funded by the agency. According to ScienceInsider, the bill would require the NSF director to certify that every grant met the following conditions:

The grant must "advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and... secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science"

It must also be "the finest quality, groundbreaking, and answer questions or solve problems that are of utmost importance to society at large"

The grant should not be "duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies"

The last of these is a reasonable requirement, but it already exists. Both the NSF and National Institutes of Health have rules that are intended to block new grants that have previously received funding. Mistakes may sometimes get made—it's hard to keep track of who's being paid to do what across multiple federal agencies—but there's already an effort to limit this.

The other two requirements, however, completely misunderstand both basic research and the role of the National Science Foundation. Basic research is largely about exploring the unknown; by definition, it's almost impossible to tell which areas of research will end up being groundbreaking or have commercial applications. And the NSF is specifically tasked with funding basic research and science education.

It's informative to contrast these rules with a current example of NSF funding. Prior to last year, the NSF had no idea whether the Higgs boson really existed or whether it would behave like the one predicted by the Standard Model. Yet the foundation put millions of dollars into the Large Hadron Collider and the support infrastructure behind it. So far, the Higgs is looking rather mundane, and it may never have commercial applications or implications for society at large. The bill, as structured, would appear to mean the end of funding for that kind of work.

This isn't the only recent example of Congress altering the rules for research, either. Last month, Tom Coburn (R-OK) sent a letter to the director of the National Science Foundation, in which he listed a series of grants funded by the agency were a waste of taxpayer money. Shortly thereafter, Coburn added an amendment to a funding bill that would block the ability of the NSF to fund political science unless the grant can be certified as "promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States." That amendment was passed as part of the budget.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has also come under fire from Congress. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating the large public communication budget given to the National Cancer Institute, and while they had him on the Hill, House members grilled NIH director Francis Collins about a paper by researcher Stanton Glantz. Glantz studies public health and tobacco regulations, often using documents obtained from cigarette makers during lawsuits. In this paper, he concludes that the political infrastructure that helped organize the Tea Party movement was developed originally to oppose tobacco legislation.

Needless to say, that did not go over well with the members of that organization within Congress.

With the possible exception of the budget allocated to PR and public awareness at the National Cancer Institute, most of these issues come back to an uneasiness about the research itself. People either don't like it or don't understand why peer reviewers rated it so highly, so they assume it is either an error or a waste of money. In this case, their response seems to be to try to intervene in the process of grant approval, something that's normally left to expert peer reviewers.

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A substantial fraction of basic research goes nowhere. We learn some small facts, but the research doesn't provide a big advance. But, it is typically impossible to know what research will provide a big advance. As inefficient as basic science research is, there simply isn't another general method.

Of course the NSF is not perfect, but I challenge all the doubters to compare its approach to funding against virtually any other organization: here is a detailed description of NSF engineering funding processes (http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2011/06/an-insider’s-perspective-on-national-science-foundation-funding/). My experience in Biology is similar to that described for engineering, although the current funding rate is actually lower: ~4%. And you can only submit two proposals per year. If neither are funded this year, you've got to wait for next year.

I do not encourage my graduate students to have a career like mine. I love science but: you work crazy long hours with lots of stress. You've got to have funding, but funding rates are so low that top rated research is often not funded. Without funding, you cannot attract graduate students, cannot get post-docs, and will need to fire those you may currently have. Without funding, it is almost impossible to do the work you got into science to do. It wasn't always as hard as it is now to get funding, but times have changed and there simply is not enough money for basic research that is already being proposed (much less cutting back). Two of my colleagues have taken positions outside the US (one in Europe, the other in China) because they can get funding much more easily.

In case you are wondering, I am at a top research university, currently have NSF funding and am working with great students that work long hours for crappy pay.

Creationism and climate change denial will have free reign once that pesky "peer review" is out of the way. Congresscritters know the only way to Holy True American Christian Science and that game is far easier to rig than those rigid, too-good-for-kickbacks so-called scientists.

The feds are pissing money away in all directions, and this here guy is attempting to stifle science research under the guise of curbing wasteful spending; never mind that the science grants are a fraction of a fraction of one percent of the budget. He's got a real motive somewhere. But it isn't saving money. He's keeping his real motives hidden.

This review process will likely just cost extra money in hidden expenses, anyway.

Once the Cold War ended, science cuts were inevitable. So much of the science funding was done with the understanding that only continued development kept us from annihilation at the hands of the more advanced Russians.

Why are so many southern republicans against advancing science? Apologies in advance to rational southerners and reasonable republicans. After watching the PBS program (that I was made aware of here on ARS) about republicans in the Texas school board and the underhanded ways they try to limit science in classrooms that doesn't agree with their religious views, I'm honestly concerned for the NSF & NIH.

Ok. There is no easy way to say this. This blows donkey balls. There should be a test of some sort that you have to pass to sit on these committees. The questions should range on all scientific discipline and the results including the answers should be made public. That might help.

I almost cannot believe this is not some sort of big trolling action. To do something like this and actually think it will benefit the united states? My mind can simply not understand why people do this and can still sleep at night believing they did the right thing.

Are there any well-known examples of NSF-funded basic research with no obvious applications at the time that eventually did lead to commercially viable products? The average voter doesn't care about the Higgs boson, but they might if I could say, "If we hadn't funded basic research into X, which seemed completely worthless at the time, we wouldn't have had Y, which you use everyday"

The feds are pissing money away in all directions, and this here guy is attempting to stifle science research under the guise of curbing wasteful spending; never mind that the science grants are a fraction of a fraction of one percent of the budget. He's got a real motive somewhere. But it isn't saving money. He's keeping his real motives hidden.

This review process will likely just cost extra money in hidden expenses, anyway.

He is the guy who came up with SOPA, so I am pretty sure his intentions are somewhere between handing taxpayer money to industry interests and handing more power to industry interests to decide where our tax money goes.

By look of it, based on this article and the linked Wired article, it looks like the point of the bill is to give grant money to projects that people feel are important.

Are there any well-known examples of NSF-funded basic research with no obvious applications at the time that eventually did lead to commercially viable products? The average voter doesn't care about the Higgs boson, but they might if I could say, "If we hadn't funded basic research into X, which seemed completely worthless at the time, we wouldn't have had Y, which you use everyday"

It's not specifically NSF funded, but there are myriad practical applications from NASA R&D which demonstrate the principle.

Why are so many southern republicans against advancing science? Apologies in advance to rational southerners and reasonable republicans.

Smith doesn't think he's against advancing science, he and his constituents think those areas of science are bullshit. Simply assuming that they're irrational is not going to get you very far in convincing them otherwise.

And as long as science funding comes largely from the government, it's going to be (mis)managed by the political process. It will always be weighed down by rules and regulations, various interests will have their snouts in the trough, etc. Public sector vs. private sector is just a choice between which one sucks less.

The political system is never going to be a good way to direct funding towards good science, as it's not good at allocating resources to much of anything.

But the scientific community has not developed a good way of determining what science is worthwhile. At best you've got an old boy's club of scientific journals, and a handful of prizes. The amount of work that is just tossed in the garbage is immense. If, for instance, the standard models predict X, and you verify experimentally that the standard prediction is true, you throw the results in the garbage because they're not interesting.

So the next guy has to come along and run the exact same experiments. Call that "commodity science," in the commercial world commodities may not be worth a lot, but you don't just throw them away.

There is some work being done on organizing and classifying experimental data and research (I worked in this area years ago) but there's not a great way to nail down the utility of science. That politicians are judging it by their intuition and personal agendas is regrettable, but what else can they use?

The truth is the scientific community has not demonstrated a measure that is consistent or logical.

Yet, we can go back and look at historical data to put a dollar value on some areas of research. And we should be able to expand that to use historical data to estimate and discount the future value of most candidate research areas. This wouldn't be a trivial project, and the political process will never allocate funds optimally, but it would be a hell of a lot more persuasive to politicians than, "trust us, we're scientists."

This actually is a good point, in that how are we as a country supposed to decide how to spend our research funds? [hyperbole] You have one side that is saying "why should all these people decide on how to spend our money for us", and on he other side it is "why should we let these rubes make decisions on what is important and what isn't? [/hyperbole] I totally believe we should as a whole figure out how we want to spend our research dollars. The only problem is how political certain scientific fields have gotten. Timmer's example of social science research is a good example. There are a lot of people who have convinced themselves that sociology is completely bullshit and would never support researching it. There is enough FUD spreading around that we would have whole areas of knowledge closed off to our researchers and we as a country would start to fall behind. The nation should be able to decide how to allocate its money, but we need to make sure that a subjects popularity doesn't mean we snub avenues of knowledge.

Are there any well-known examples of NSF-funded basic research with no obvious applications at the time that eventually did lead to commercially viable products? The average voter doesn't care about the Higgs boson, but they might if I could say, "If we hadn't funded basic research into X, which seemed completely worthless at the time, we wouldn't have had Y, which you use everyday"

Edward Mills Purcell was doing government astronomy research when he discovered nuclear magnetic resonance. This is the discovery that eventually made the MRI possible.